Title: Nil By Mouth

Author/Artist: Gary Oldman

Media: Video

Reviewer: Pan

Without a doubt, 'Nil By Mouth' is one of the darkest, bleakest, and most powerful films to emerge in the UK in recent years. Set in the vast concrete netherworld of the council estates that line the Old Kent Road in South London, this is a film that cuts through the lies and the consensus that denies that class and poverty still exist in this country. Despite all the hype about New Britain and the Millenium, this is a film that goes for the jugular in showing us a side of life that the tourists never see and which the media like to pretend doesn't exist any more.

For a while back in the middle '80's I lived on these estates, which made the council estates of Brixton where I was born and brought up look like paradise. At the time the heroin epidemic which swept like a cancer through the working class communities of the area was only just beginning. The level of violence, police oppression, and general squalor were like nothing else, and this in an area only minutes from those who sit in power in Westminster, and from the bastards in the Labour Party whose headquarters lie only a few hundred metres from these estates.

Nil By Mouth pulls no punches. The language is harsh, sexist, sometimes racist and always violent. This is a culture of degradation, where violence is the easiest response, this is a culture closed in on itself, self-destructive and going nowhere. This is portrayed brilliantly as we follow the downward spiral as Ray (played ruthlesly by a convincing Ray Winstone) - a south London geezer writ large - lets the booze and the drugs get to him. His partner, Val, (an excellent performance by Kathy Burke), wears that expression of sullen defeat that you see in so many working-class women. She's got no hope, no future, nothing but a life-time of misery, and when she is beaten by Ray the violence is so real, so nasty, that it makes your average serial killer flick look weak.

There's nothing here to draw you to the characters. There's nothing here in mitigation. People don't have to be like this, brutal conditions don't mean that you have to act like an animal - and most people on these estates aren't like that. And yet what the film does is to capture something real; there are people like this, there are lives ruined before they've started. There's no excuse and yet what becomes clear is that this behavious is cyclic, repeating itself, passed on from generation to generation like some kind of virus.

This is a film without hope. A film where there is no redeeming message, no glimpse of a way out of the misery. Heroin fucks you up. And so does poverty and and environment that breeds contempt for other people. But this isn't to damn the film. Gary Oldman may be big in Hollywood, but he doesn't seem to have forgotten where he comes from. He's to be congratulated in making a film so provocative that it demands a response. In a sense he's lucky, not just because he got out, but because he's now in a position to make a statement as unflinching and uncompromising as this one. Some of us having been trying to have our say and have been resolutely ignored or else informed by publishers and people in the media that settings and stories as bleak as this one are of no interest...